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March 31, 2008

Whisher: Metered Wi-Fi made easy

John Biggs

16 comments »

wonk.jpgI’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a while but they just launched some nice beta software so it seems like the right time. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their alpha code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live.

Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter. They’re offering white-box services to providers who can rebrand a Whisher hotspot or simple pay-as-you-go accounts for cybercafes, etc.

You can also share your Wi-Fi for free and then pick up other hotspots anywhere in the world, similar to FON. This, combined with micropayments model, makes for an interesting product. The product is available now for OS X and Windows. You can download it here. Coverage is fairly sparse in the U.S. but it’s considerably more robust overseas.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Whisher: 料金制Wi-Fiを手軽に

    March 31st, 2008 at 7:49 pm

  2. geyq.com

    March 31st, 2008 at 9:10 pm

  3. Saving Coffeeshop Wi-Fi « Perpetual Motion

    April 1st, 2008 at 1:46 pm

Comments

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  1. John Doe

    March 31st, 2008 at 3:42 pm

    Won’t I be breaking laws by reselling my bandwidth? The TOS of my cable ISP clearly states that I cannot sell my connection to anyone else…..

  2. John Biggs

    March 31st, 2008 at 3:44 pm

    you don’t have to sell it. you can “share” it for free and get access to other whisher spots around the world.

  3. dave

    March 31st, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    Perfect for my 3rd floor apartment right above a busy starbucks in NY

  4. John Doe

    March 31st, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Biggs,
    How can I trust some random guy browsing “hic-hic-hic-hic” site from my router? If he does any “unworthy” act, I will have someone banging on my door @ 2am in the morning….
    Whisher is giving the average “joe” ability to have fun at my expense….. now even WEP/WPA2 isn’t secure

  5. Mike Puchol

    March 31st, 2008 at 5:06 pm

    John (#4):

    What Whisher does is give you control over when and how you share - you can choose to make your signal private any time you want, and you will soon be able to see every user that logged onto your WiFi under My Account. Thus, if there was any strange activity at the time, you will be able to prove there was someone else connected.

    Every user that connects to your signal must have created an account with Whisher, so there is no anonymous use allowed. WEP/WPA2 is just as secure as it was before, because you, as the owner, controls the sharing.

  6. Jorge

    March 31st, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    Read the contract harder, Mr. Biggs.

    The definition sections always define “selling” to include services like this, where you are trading your internet connection for services. (Basically, a sale, with money removed because it’s unnecessary).

    Of course, the ISP has no way of determining what traffic is from a service like this, and what traffic is permissible access granted by the customer to, say, guests and family.

  7. Shane

    March 31st, 2008 at 6:34 pm

    What happened to that other company that was in the news all the time - Fon? Are they still around? Anybody uses them?

  8. Roger Schultz

    March 31st, 2008 at 7:11 pm

    Shane (#7):

    I am still using a FON router, connected to the net and sharing my bandwidth since january 07 and it works fine!

    And, for sure they are still on business, and growing, mostly in Japan.

  9. Mark Schoneveld

    April 1st, 2008 at 10:30 am

    This looks like a promising application, if it gets wide adoption.

    I’ve been diggin’ a light-weight wi-fi plugin that does a lot of the same thing, minus the money part. Wi-Find will show you locked and unlocked networks as well as signal strength straight in the Apple wireless menu.

  10. Tim Breslin

    April 1st, 2008 at 10:33 am

    Actually its called WiFind - and you can download it for free at http://www.tastyapps.com.

  11. Mike Puchol

    April 6th, 2008 at 4:10 am

    Mark: Whisher is free, unlike other similar applications - even if you only want the signal strength and encryption indicator, it’s still worth having, as it costs nothing. And if one day you decide to use the WiFi sharing and WiFi Out access features, you don’t need to install anything else, it’s all built in.

  12. Joe WiFi

    April 6th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    so I am guessing Whisher sw is really a client side database of all the SSIDs of ‘registered’ routers and their encryption keys. It is more clever of an approach that buying new hardware, ala Fonera et al. It looks for the strongest SSID that is in it’s database, and then connects to it. When it does it posts connection times and uses a packet filter to count up data sent/recvd and also posts this to Whisher server. Pretty cool.

    I think also a nice feature would be to let me share my 3G connections with other users in the airport, for money this time. I have 3G card… I have WiFI… Whisher should let me setup a client to client connection for this purpose, a DNCH server and do a bit of IP forwarding… all in all a nice idea, in theory.

    11b and 11g just suck too bad for any useful work. But Wisher and lots of 11n/MIMO APs could be a real good thing, in a few years. What Whisher has as an edge on Fonera and others is there is no marginal cost of dsitribution… all sw, no hw, makes for a longer lasting startup.

    There are some real killer counter strategies that the hardware guys could bring to bear here…. nonetheless the real issue for me is can the network get to a point of critical mass to where you could build a value business. Not clear.

  13. Tai

    April 17th, 2008 at 7:05 pm

    Interesting. This seems like a simpler way to share home Wi-Fi than FON. The metered rates seem high. Boingo offers day passes and unimited monthly access at $8 and $21 respectively with no term commitment. iPass now has an unlimited access with the option of 3G card. Coverage is sparse in the US. Key airport networks are missing (Chicago Ohare, JFK, LAX, etc…)

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